Confessions of a Cold Therapy Coward

Make the Cold Your Secret Weapon with this Targeted Cold Hack...even if you're a cold chicken like me.

❄️ + You = 💪!

Beginners: Get Excited about this easy & powerful intro to the cold!

Pros: Level-up even more by adding this method to your cold stack!​

A year ago...​I felt bored and was looking for a boost that would get me out of Neutral.

Cold therapy sounded promising, but I was chicken.🐔​

My body was so 'comfort adapted' that I doubted I could handle the cold.

Your body doesn't prepare you for challenges you don't have, and my body wasn't being challenged.

My biggest struggle 9-5 was lifting a water cooler jug, so my body didn't need to prepare for much.

I wanted to see what the cold had to offer, which meant my body needed to be convinced that it was doing something primal out in nature's elements, like hunting caribou in the dead of winter.

When I finally got up the nerve to take a cold shower, it was summer and the water wasn't cold enough to deliver a healthy dose of 'cold stress'.

It was a total letdown.😐​ The boost I felt was subtle in comparison to the results promised by blogs and websites.​ So the search continued....​

Another popular form of cold exposure is cryotherapy: getting blasted with -200°F cold air for a few minutes in a science-fiction looking chamber.

(Part of me was glad there wasn't a cryotherapy center nearby, because I doubted I could handle that kind of cold. Plus, it's a spendy habit.)

Digging a little deeper into cold research revealed that alongside cold showers and high-tech cryotherapy, was the humble ice pack.

(I hadn't considered ice packs for cold therapy - it was a cold hack no one talked about. Why would anyone talk about ice packs? Cryotherapy makes for a way cooler looking Instagram post.🙂)

Ice packs showed impressive results. (1)

​1 “There is much evidence to show that Cold Water Immersion and ice-pack application are both capable of inducing clinically relevant reductions in tissue temperature, and that they also provide important physiological and clinical effects.”

1 “The largest skin-temperature reductions seemed to be associ­ated with ice-pack application.The skin-temperature reduc­tions associated with Cold Water Immersion and Whole Body Cryotherapy seemed to vary slightly across studies.”

Since- a cryotherapy shop wasn't nearby,- and cold showers wouldn't be that effective until autumn or winter,​- ice packs stood out as the obvious choice for the next leg of the cold exposure journey.

​But where (on my body) should the ice packs go?

​[It was a critical decision, because the goal was to convince my body that it was doing awesome caveman things instead of hanging in an office all day.]​

(If you're going to try the super easy method I'm about to explain, please don't use cheap cold packs made in China. Sad but true, just about every cold pack on Amazon is made in China.)​

The search for a quality cold pack came up short.

Cold packs are normally used to relieve pain from minor injuries, but using them for cold therapy is a different game. With cold therapy you want to signal a healthy 'cold stress' response from your entire body. You're not looking to target a sprained ankle or something like that.

What I really needed was customizable cold gear, but nothing like that was available back then.